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Comment by miked85 | Hacker News Reader

> About 20 people I met from twitter have been over my house (for dinner, etc) at different times.

I think this would be considered extremely out of the norm. Your experiences with Twitter are definitely not typical.

No, it’s common - particularly among people who were on Twitter in its earlier days; 2007-11. A whole lot of people I know came together during those years via Twitter, as well as blogs and offline meetups, but Twitter was the glue that kept people interacting day-to-day, and plenty of those people remain good friends. Indeed I pretty much met my partner over Twitter in 2010, we got together after group social gatherings in 2011 and now we have a wonderful son together.

Things are very different now that it’s so dominated by politically-charged rhetoric and piling on, and I can understand that new social connections would more likely get drowned out these days.

People who were on Twitter in the early days are definitely not typical.

You could say that about Twitter today; it’s still a small minority of the mainstream population that is on it at all, let alone those who Tweet.

But whether it’s IRC, NNTP, Yahoo Chat, LiveJournal, Twitter, LinkedIn or any other online social platform, the practice of finding new acquaintances on the platform then parlaying them into offline professional or personal relationships is not at all unusual.

But to your point, early-days Twitter included most people who were into startups, many who were into programming, design, media, even music. Maybe small in number (say, only a few million people) but still significant and influential.

I’m conscious that this discussion is essentially becoming a debate over the definition of “typical”, which is rather pointless.

The point is that whatever your definition of “typical”, the number of people making offline friends and business connections via Twitter and other online platforms has always been significant.

I've met lots of people I first connected with on Twitter. In the early days "tweetups" were very common.

https://www.techopedia.com/definition/29045/tweetup

I've met so many people through web forums and whatnot. People think I'm absolutely insane when I mention that, I forget that it's not normal.

What's weird to me - even though I grew up in BBS-land, ran forums, and met lots of people from online - is the degree to which normie youth culture has now made this the main way of engaging and meeting. If you observe any girl/boy interaction at any random bar now, it seems there's a 90% chance they're just meeting IRL for the first time. It feels like the pandemic has upped this. What I see as the downside is that it's a supermarket - you really don't see a lot of couples who've been together or are together for any length of time going out and enjoying each other's company. That seems to have diminished, along with other social skills that aren't mediated by a platform.

I was listening to a podcast interview, two people who live in different countries met on Twitter and started a online business and are doing very well. They have never met in person.

We can call it luck, fate, law of attraction or whatever. But these things do happen. Maybe not that common.

It’s probably common for at least 20 other people.

Not really, because they met at different times.

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